Monday, June 20, 2016

An Interview with John Uttley, Author of Where's Sailor Jack?

A family saga that
takes in three generations of two families and all the struggles, tribulations
and fireworks that you would expect as well as plenty you wouldn’t. Where’s
Sailor Jack is the story of Bob Swarbrick’s journey from
Northern-grammar-school-boy to business magnate through the break up of his
marriage, the arrival of a new lover and an unhurried, consistent search for
meaning in his life.

Bob and Richard are grammar school boys ‘done
good’. Starting life in similar working class homes they have progressively
climbed the ladder until they are able to both sit comfortably as champions of
industry, and look back on their achievements and failures with the keen
Northern wit that never left them, even after years of exile life in the south.

As they reflect on their lives, loves and
business decisions both try to find an explanation to fit their lives: Bob
seeks purpose, Richard meaning. While soul-searching, the reader is witness to
an exemplary part of British history - from their childhoods in post war
Northern England to the boom years in a prospering South (before survivors guilt
starts to bite in their latter years and they wonder just how their
opportunities would have worked out if they were born a few decades later).

The book covers and takes a unique look at
romance, religion, business sense and social mobility but does so with wry
tongue in its cheek whilst looking for a laugh, not a deep and meaningful
conversation.

On a Sunday soon after his move
north-west, Bob was flying high on Virgin, to LAX, as everyone but he knew Los
Angeles airport was called. His last long-haul flight had been on Atomic
Futures’ business in the bulkhead with British Airways. At over six foot and
heavily built, he could make good use of the leg room. In an unflattering
lavatory mirror, he saw receding, greying hair and many wrinkles above a jaw
line a boxer could break a fist on. He’d never quite understood how his rugged
looks had charmed the several-to-many women along the way. The seating
arrangement in Virgin’s best seats made the cabin look like a beauty salon, but
he’d played safe and eschewed the offer of an on-board facial. The Journey
Information on the monitor told him there was about an hour of the flight to
go, confirmed by something looking like the Grand Canyon out of the window,
though it looked bleak enough to have been the surface of another planet.

He was trying not to sleep on the way
out, nor to go to bed until at least ten o’clock Pacific Standard Time. He’d
flicked between the films on the in-flight entertainment system, and found
nothing he’d wanted. He’d then settled down to listen to some music, first
Elvis, then Ray Charles and finally Abba, who’d bounced along merrily at first
until a cold sweat told him that he was the loser standing small alongside
seventies woman. He switched Agnetha off to pick up the book he’d brought, Ian
McEwan’s Saturday, which he immediately put down again. His eyes were tired.

He reclined the chair to be alone with
his musings on his return to Lancashire. Blackpool was making a good fist of
doing itself up, despite New Labour lousing up the Las Vegas style casino
scheme, not that he’d ever really wanted it. In the evenings, the place was
alive with young ladies joyfully, sometimes even decorously, celebrating their
hen nights with like-minded friends. The folk who lived in St Chad’s hadn’t
changed that much. The young people at church had the same freshness that he’d
once had, full of their multimedia world and excited about their opportunities,
though the ladder had been pulled up since his day, leaving cows from the Fylde
fields with more chance of going through the eye of a needle than any ordinary
kid entering the kingdom of riches he’d inherited. Lancashire wasn’t at the
centre of things the way it had been back then, with Blackpool the Mecca for
comedians, Liverpool the capital of music, the mighty Granada television like a
second BBC, and the Manchester Guardian thinking about what the world would do
tomorrow. He saw The Guardian moving to London as an even bigger betrayal than
John Lennon’s sleep-in.

The summer of 1963 with Freewheelin’ on
his turntable and the Mersey sound on every radio was forever to remain his
Archimedean point. Martin Luther King was dreaming his dream accompanied
vibrato by Joan Baez and civil rights were coming. Bras weren’t being burnt
though. Much later Jane challenged him with why not. He’d answered that women’s
liberation hadn’t come out of nowhere. She’d generously agreed that it was only
fair for apes like him to have had their day in the sun before the real
business got done.

He’d had a vacation job in Stanley Park
and that had given him an affinity with the old codgers from the Great War who
came for the brass band concerts. Though they were sitting in God’s waiting
room, they were cheerful, talking for hours about space travel and the like but
not of course about their health problems or the trenches. He thought of his
never-liberated Grannie who died at the start of the pivotal year. She’d make
him green jelly with bananas whenever he went round as a kid and had knitted
most of the jumpers he was still wearing through university after her death.
His sister had in her kitchen the old milking stool from Grannie’s farm-girl
days, with more than a thousand years of history stored in its battered wood.
Like the religion his ancestors had shared, its purpose had been endorsed by
the long passage of time. To lose either would be to lose his soul. He didn’t
want to live so long that his memory of Grannie dimmed.

He was off to LA to discuss the
possibility of him chairing a solar technology company, The Northern Solstice
Inc., looking to be floated on AIM, the small companies’ part of the London
Stock Exchange. He’d created a portfolio of non-executive chairmanships since
his nuclear demise; nice work if you can get it, he’d say. He’d had surprising
success given that he was temperamentally stuck somewhere between public and
private sector. On one venture, he’d helped rescue a telecoms company after the
dotcom bubble burst, which he’d then sold to a trade buyer, a conglomerate
chaired by Sir Charles, for a huge profit, a month before the market fell
again. He’d found that the private sector was about living on your wits rather
than on solid ground.

He hadn’t much knowledge of solar
economics or if it was such a good environmental thing. He hoped that this
opportunity could provide some atonement for his past environmental sins. As a
nuclear man, he’d never been a denier of the greenhouse effect. He knew how
expensive nuclear had been but could see no better option despite his lingering
doubts on waste disposal, weapons proliferation and operational balls-up
issues. He was as antagonistic towards wind power as most power engineers and
ornithologists were.

The invitation to LA had come from a
woman he’d got to know at Black and Robertshaw, an accounting firm working out
of Bristol whose corporate finance arm had handled the telecoms sale. They were
advising on the Northern Solstice flotation, acting as Nomad – shorthand for
nominated adviser. Wendy Ballinger was already in LA and he was to meet her the
next day with the acting Chairman and the CEO.

In the arrivals hall, the driver
arranged by Virgin was holding up his name. All upper class passengers could
have a limo for up to an hour’s journey. Anaheim was in the band. He was
stopping at the Stonehaven there, near to the Northern Solstice factory in
Yorba Linda as well as close to Disney. Wendy was upmarket and uptown, staying
at the Westin. His mobile beeped a message as he reached his room. Wendy wanted
a word. He was desperate for the lavatory, but couldn’t prevent himself from
ringing her first. As he waited for her to answer, her face appeared in front
of him on the screen in his brain (not on his phone, that was an early, basic
model), almost elegant, with a distinguished nose. Her blonde hair looked
natural enough but did owe something to a bottle. He found her both friendly
and competent, a pleasure to do business with. She was a while answering and
his internal camera panned slowly downwards. In her early forties, married
without children to an older man, her bosom was worthy of the name; her long
legs went all the way to her not insubstantial bum. And she was intelligent. He
should have thought of that first.

She had bad news, disclosed in pure,
gentle, Gloucestershire tones that could have belonged to a sixth former. She’d
been at a pre-meeting with the acting Chairman, a guy called Peter Forster,
along with the CEO, Emil Fares. Forster was a hard-nosed South African who
owned Forster Capital, the largest shareholder. He’d told Wendy that they
didn’t want her to handle the listing as Black and Robertshaw had no market
strength.

Bob wanted to ask if that meant he’d
wasted his time coming out, and if somebody would be reimbursing his expenses,
but realised he’d better sympathise first. She didn’t need that, believing that
her firm, although not a strong broking house, had done a pretty good job. “No
first division broker would handle such a small transaction,” she asserted.
“And there’s so little time before the date they want to float that they’d like
to take a look at you. They’ll also want to know if you’ve any other ideas as
to who else could act as Nomad.”

“I’d have no idea. I wouldn’t want the
job now anyway,” he said, honestly enough as Wendy was a big part of the
attraction.

“That’s up to you, but I’d be grateful
for my reputation if you could hear them out. Perhaps Divinity might do it.
They’re pitching hard into renewables.”

Bob became more interested. “Fancy that.
An old friend of mine from my nuclear days, Richard Shackleton, told me over a
round of golf that he’d just joined Divinity Partners. He said it was about
time the Godhead had some new blood. Do you know him?”

Wendy did know Richard, who she called a
terrific bloke. “Hey, thee, me and him could make a great team if they’d have
us,” Bob reckoned. “Can’t we get him to do the broking and you to be the
Nomad?” Wendy doubted Forster would agree to that idea but was happy for Bob to
try it on.

Bob was already looking forward to
Richard joining them and started to tell Wendy about his daft ideas. “Like me,
he doesn’t think metaphysics should be a dry study of what can and can’t be
said, but a licence to think insanely. According to him, we can’t actually
change anything physical and all events rigidly follow the laws of nature. But
we are free to make whatever we want of what happens. I remember a flotation
meeting with loads of advisers. We took time out to discuss Schrödinger’s cat,
as you do. Richard…”

“As you and Richard do, you mean. Tell
me about that some other time,” she interrupted. “George Coulson, the CFO, will
be in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock to collect you. We’re meeting in Emil’s
office at nine thirty.”

Having at last managed to have a pee, he
unpacked his case, lining up one shirt and tie, his suit, a pair of socks and
shoes for the morning. He put pyjamas on the pillow, soap bag and razor in the
bathroom, Saturday and the alarm clock by his bed, before he had had a quick
shower, drenching the bathroom floor. At a quarter past nine PST, twenty two
hours since leaving his London flat, he went to bed.

He quickly went to sleep, only to wake
with a start at about two o’clock, gasping for breath. The heavy quilt was over
his head. He pulled the quilt halfway down the bed and managed to sleep again.
An hour later he woke again. This time he turned the air conditioning off.
Sleep wouldn’t come. He tried to read for a while, propped up against the
pillows. In the big mirror on the opposite wall, he caught sight of his gaunt
face drained of colour. With a shock, he realised he was looking at his Dad,
Jack Swarbrick, laid out at the funeral parlour. That Swarbrick big conk was a
matter of pride.

Of course it wasn’t his Dad, but the
embodiment of hard-wired genetics. Wendy’s face, and much prettier conk, had
frozen on his internal screen. He slept through till 6.30am with her in view.

John Uttley was born in Lancashire
just as the war was ending. Grammar school educated there, he read Physics at
Oxford before embarking on a long career with the CEGB and National Grid Group.
He was Finance Director at the time of the miners' strike, the Sizewell Inquiry
and privatisation, receiving an OBE in 1991. Shortly afterwards, he suffered
his fifteen minutes of fame when he publicly gave a dividend to charity in the
middle of the fat cat furore. More recently, he has taken an external London
degree in Divinity while acting as chairman of numerous smaller companies, both
UK and US based. This is his first novel. He is married to Janet, living just
north of London with three grown children and dog.